Re: Joe Walnes feedback on "ComponentHaus now does full dependency trees"

On Jan 21, 2004, at 1:00 PM, Ryan Hoegg wrote:
> There are some interesting ideas here.  Couldn't the RECOMMENDS 
> directive be eliminated in favor of just using DEPENDS?  And I think 
> it would make sense to replace SUGGESTS with SUPPORTS, while adding 
> some kind of priority to supported libraries. One could even allow the 
> user to specify his own library preferences.

RECOMMENDS and SUGGESTS are clarifications on DEPENDS :)

in debian, a package doesn't need anything in RECOMMENDS or SUGGESTS, 
but they are as the name says, either recommended or suggested to 
accompany the package.

of course, there's a lot of grey area when saying what is recommended 
and suggested :)

> Some complications that might arise are
> - when to silently use what you've got and when to ask the user for 
> input
> - how to handle version ranges
> - I have two levels of PROVIDES hierarchy above: XMLParser -> DOM -> 
> Xerces.  How far can that go?
>
> Lots of complexity in these ideas, but I'd like to see guided 
> installation like Joe describes.

heck, why not just copy what debian does? :)
-pete